


A Handsome Stranger Called Death

by hopelesse, isozyme



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel 1872
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Folklore, M/M, Podfic Available, Rattlesnakes, Vampire Steve, fix-it (ish)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:33:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22548613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopelesse/pseuds/hopelesse, https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: Steve Rogers was an optimist, and he had no sense for the limits of one man with a six-shooter and a strong will, but he was canny enough to know that he wasn’t getting any good done as pig food.A mashup of 1872 and T. Kingfisher’sJackalope Wives.  You could also call it a vampire AU.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 29
Kudos: 169
Collections: You Gave Me A Stocking 2019





	A Handsome Stranger Called Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WhenasInSilks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/gifts).



> Fic by Isozyme  
> Podfic by Hopelesse
> 
> My fandom stocking fill for WhenasinSilks -- I saw you talking vampires on the discord, and I thought: yessssssssssssssss. I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Thanks to Blossoms for beta and brainstorming services, and to Hopelesse for being my partner in crime! Credit to Azdaema for the [work skin.](https://github.com/Azdaema/AO3-Skin_Podfic/tree/master/standard) Title from [A Handsome Stranger Called Death](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgK7YgB5gpc) by Foe.

  


### Details

  * **Length:** 30 minutes



### Listen

  * On the Internet Archive [here](https://archive.org/details/ahandsomestranger)
  * On Google Drive [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ce7E7KFEXXTFwwmkd64lBQa49qnlpz2v/view?usp=sharing)



### Credits

  * **Author:** isozyme
  * **Reader:** hopelesse
  * **Cover artist:** hopelesse



* * *

There was a time when the West was full of old gods. Huge dark things that ran with the buffalo, ghosts of elk and mammoth. Gods of hide and chipped flint.

Life changed, and gods changed with it, bringing coyote and sidewinder and thunderbird.

And then trains snaked in from the East, chewing through mountains, and the people they brought didn’t want a god who came rooted to the land. The water-fouling, arrogant men worshipped money like it was holy. The religion of gold is fed with blood, and even gods can bleed. But the nature of the West is to take a piece of everything for itself, and it can draw its own saints from the wet mouth of a wound.

* * *

A pig has teeth like a man’s grown long. If a pig were to smile, it would be the ghastly grin of a split-cheeked human face.

Sheriff Steve Rogers was too dead to make any observations about a boar’s smile, but not so dead he couldn’t feel one digging into his liver. He’d taken a bullet to the chest, and the lead was damn heavy. It would have been better for him if he had a weaker spirit. But Rogers planted his feet on the ground and staked his soul into the dirt. He stayed until the laughter of his murderers faded away, a stubborn nag standing in her stall while the barn burned down around her.

Old Sidewinder wasn’t usually drawn to already dying things. He preferred to lie in the shade of a porch or a brittlebrush and wait for some bright-eyed and hopping thing to pass by. But the town of Timely was eating itself, and Sidewinder loves swallowing.

Rogers was drifting in a red haze when the pigs shied away with a squeal. All pigs hate a snake, and Sidewinder was a thousand snakes in one fat, diamond-backed body.

_Sheriff,_ Sidewinder hissed. _You’re dying._

_Like hell I am,_ Rogers spat back. He wasn’t sure that was true, but he was half-eaten and pretty angry; Rogers figured that meant he could say whatever he wanted.

_The town you love is sliding into a gullet,_ said Sidewinder. _And no one asked me permission, Sheriff. None of them wondered if the desert wanted their corpse._

_That sounds like...your problem,_ Rogers said.

_I have a bargain for you, law-man._

Rogers smiled -- his lips didn’t move, he was too dead for that -- and said, _Shoot._

_Let me bite you. You’ll be hale as pocket mouse in the granary._

_And what do you get?_

A snake can’t shrug or spread its hands wide to indicate ambivalence. Sidewinder flicked his tongue out with its forks stretched wide, tasting lifeblood to the left and hogshit to the right. _Why, it’s not the kind of trade where you get to know the price, Sheriff. I bite. You live._

Steve Rogers was an optimist, and he had no sense for the limits of one man with a six-shooter and a strong will, but he was canny enough to know that he wasn’t getting any good done as pig food.

* * *

Tony Stark had a hole in his cheerful heart. Now, a heart is meant to have four holes: two for the blood to go in and two for the blood to come back out. But Tony’s was torn open like a field-dressed rabbit.

This was fine. What Tony didn’t have he could make from metal. He needed to go somewhere, he built a railroad. He wanted revenge, he built someone’s death. And when he was tired of sorrow, he crafted himself a workshop and a purpose to life that didn’t require him to feel anything. It was almost as good as alcohol, and he woke up every day able to shoot straight as a plumb line.

* * *

Rattlesnake venom chews blood into soup and leaves it to pool, black and heavy, under the skin. It’ll make your arm fat as a late summer squash and about as useful, too.

Steve Rogers stumbled in the desert, swollen with rebirth, for a fortnight.

Then his skin faded from indigo to purple, and purple to scarlet, and he was whole again. He was formed in the shape of a man, with unscaled skin and round pupils. But there were long, hollow teeth folded against his palate, and at the height of noon he wished only to sit under a shelf of desert shale and watch the shadows move. He gained the skill of absolute stillness, the kind of stillness that makes a creature vanish in plain sight, and he’d gotten so quick with a pistol he’d have it holstered by the time the bullet struck its target.

But most of all, he was hungry.

* * *

Hammerscale can be used to identify areas where metal was worked thousands of years after the forge was abandoned. Pounding iron knocks off flakes of black oxides, which then permeate the dirt. Tools can be re-used and relocated, buildings can burn down, but the soil will betray a smithy’s grave to anyone with a magnet.

Tony Stark’s boots stood on faintly metallic ground as he worked. During the day, Tony pounded steel into delicate, useful shapes. But at night he couldn’t sleep, so he spent it on mindless tasks. On the night Steve came back to Timely, Tony was forging nails.

The modern way to make nails was to cut one tapered strip from a sheet of metal, then hammer the heads flat one at a time. It was a chore Tony did himself, knocking out a few hundred nails a night. Never knew when you could use a nail.

Steve stepped through the doorway to the blacksmith’s shop with inhuman slowness. He made no sound, while Tony made quite a lot of it, whistling and throwing his finished nails underhand into a bucket full of their fellows.

“Oh Danny boy,” Steve sang roughly, in a voice that hadn’t been used much except to swear when he stubbed his toe or mutter to himself the number of turns in a canyon before he got lost. “The pipes, the pipes are calling.”

Tony shouldn’t have been able to hear under the ringing of his hammer, but his bent head rose.

“Aw, it’s just you again,” Tony said, waving a dismissive hand. “Go ‘way, you can haunt me when the furnace is cold.”

Steve tongued his folded teeth. He hadn’t expected to be called a ghost -- and an unwelcome one at that. If he’d been looking, Steve might have been able to see two small holes above the door frame, where until a fortnight ago a horseshoe had hung to ward off wandering spirits. The horseshoe was kicked under Tony’s coal box, relieved of its duties.

“Stark, I ain’t been in your workshop in a quarter of a year,” Steve said, coughing some of the hiss out of his throat before he continued. “An’ I was dead in between then and now.”

Tony wiped his face, leaving his mustache all askew like the fan of a cat’s whiskers.

“I’m in my right mind, Steve. I know what’s real and what’s grief having eyes of its own. I only talk back ‘cause I miss you so bad.”

“You missed me?”

Stark smacked another nailhead flat and gave Steve a look like he was the dumbest thing on God’s dusty Earth. “Yeah, babe, I miss you. I regret every night that I never got drunk enough to ask you to dance. Look at me, talkin’ to myself stone cold sober -- and you think I don’t have a busted heart?”

Steve sidled up to the forge, where it could warm his body and make him quicker. The red heat of it made his blood pump faster and returned his hands to a human temperature.

In life, Steve had been efficient, blunt, and unsubtle. His emotions and his movements were broad, simple things, applied like white-wash over plaster: even and fair. In the twilight of death, deadly grace had crept in on Steve from the corners, and it surprised him how delicately he placed his hand on the breast of Tony’s work-pocked leather apron.

“This hasn’t happened before,” Tony said, looking into Steve’s round, silvered eyes, flat and metallic like the shine of a sheriff’s badge.

Against his will, a fang twitched downwards in Steve’s mouth. Here was his home in the shape of a man, and he hungered.

Tony dropped his hammer to the ground. It landed on its head and balanced there, handle standing upright like a whipping post.

_More time,_ Steve cried to the hunger in his chest. _Give me time! Time to kill Roxxon, and time to love this man._

“I don’t kill easy,” Steve said softly. He kissed Tony on each eyelid, and held him as he fell, weeping, his arms slung around Steve’s neck and his ragged cheek against Steve’s jaw.

* * *

A viper rations his venom. The sallow fluid is rare and precious as gold to him. It is both his meal ticket and his final line of defense, and he must take time to fatten his cheeks with it between bites.

Roxxon’s deputies died singly, like clockwork, one each Sunday.

They were found each week with a bullet in their brow and lurid, bruised faces: eyes fat and swollen shut, cheeks taut and black like the skin of a grape.

There were no trials.

* * *

Steve split his time between Tony and the high desert. He ate alone, because he no longer desired cooked meat. He would sit still and silent until a rangy hare loped up, unafraid, then snatch it bare-handed. It went down his throat in one piece, his long teeth walking along its spine.

“Red Wolf would be glad to see you,” Tony said, while Steve leaned on an unused anvil with his back to the furnace. “Natasha too.”

Steve shook his head. He didn’t need to know if the desert wanted him to take more from Timely. It was enough to lick his fangs around Tony and yearn. Besides, he wasn’t natural. Dead men weren’t welcomed home, even if they’d been a friendly face alive.

The hours in Tony’s house kept Steve human enough.

When he slept, he curled up by the window on Tony’s musty, overstuffed armchair. He’d dragged the chair up the stairs to Tony’s bedroom without asking permission, although Steve often dozed in the afternoons while Tony was sweating in the workshop, and was wakeful most cool desert nights.

Slumber made Tony softer, face slackened in peace. Steve wondered if indulging one of his hungers would lessen the other, or make it greater.

The question was answered one night in front of Tony’s wood stove. Tony looked up from packing his pipe and caught Steve’s starving gaze.

“I can help with that,” he said lowly, and ran his fingers from Steve’s knee up to the ties of his breeches.

Tony used his hand, and then his mouth.

“Sorry,” Steve said, after. “I shouldn’t -- “

Tony hummed a wordless query, thumb rubbing lazy circles on Steve’s hipbone.

Steve hooked one finger behind the needle-tooth he kept tucked behind his gums and stretched it forward. He hadn’t shown this part of his undeath to Tony. The sharp bones and folds of pink flesh inside his mouth were stomach-churning, he knew. Steve’d been turned off mirrors for a while. Lucky he didn’t need to shave any longer.

“You don’t want these comin’ close to any parts you’re precious about,” he said. Certainly nowhere flushed with blood, veins rubbing proud against Steve’s tongue.

Tony raised his eyebrows. “I sure figure I don’t.” He kissed Steve’s chest, then used his blunt teeth to scrape over Steve’s nipple. “But we can manage.”

* * *

Where Steve walked, the cholla thorns leapt out of the way.

He dragged J.T. Jones by the shirt collar through the desert, and the oil-man was pricked by every cactus along the way. His fine suit ripped on rocks, and his slicked black hair fell greasy over his face.

Steve dropped the Roxxon magnate, bleeding from a thousand punctures, into a blind canyon. He felt nothing: not hunger, nor triumph, nor peace. Behind him, there was a noisy scraping, followed by the clang of metal and the hiss of escaping steam. A suit of armor crunched through the red dirt.

“I followed you,” Tony said. Steve’s gaze remained fixed on his prey. It was said that looking into the eyes of a snake could hypnotize a man, and it’s more than half true.

“Oh Lord,” gurgled the magnate. “Save me from the wicked and the Devil, by the sword of the Archangel Michael and your divine will -- “

Steve made a wordless sound like the rattle of stones against glass and advanced like floodwater. Jones shuddered to silence.

“Sheriff,” Tony said. Steve’s head turned; Jones began to sob. “Where’s the judge?”

“Bought,” Steve hissed.

“Where’s the law?”

“Food for swine.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

_“Yes.”_

“It’s not you after all, is it?” Tony said, voice thick as dirt after rain. “You’re just some cold creature who walked in from the desert, wearing his face. And I’m a damn fool for believing it.”

Steve jerked away from Jones, one hand coming up to curl over his heart, where a star once sat. “No, no,” Steve said, rough and tumbling. “Tony, it’s me. Your Steve.”

Tony shook his head, gauntlets curling into fists.

Steve turned his back on J.T. Jones and fell to his knees before the hulking, steaming beast that had swallowed Tony Stark. “Please.”

Jones scrambled up the side of the canyon, stripping the skin from his fingertips, face ruddy with terror and tears. He ran, the only thought in his mind an animal’s gibbering compulsion to flee from death. The oil king would be found two days later, addled by thirst and cracked by the sun. Jones would never be the same, but his son would grow to quickly fill the void he left.

Tony watched from behind his solemn metal face as Steve bowed his head, baring the vertebrae at the back of his neck. “I love you,” he told the ruddy soil. He was speaking both to Tony and the ragged town of Timely. “I wanted to save everyone.”

“That’s just dumb enough to be my man,” Tony said, and Steve sagged with relief until his forehead pressed into Tony’s steel thigh, and Tony’s heavy hand found the top of Steve’s head.

* * *

Steve found that most horses refused to carry him, so when he needed to travel he rode Timely’s oldest, most jaded mule, named Primrose. She was unmoved by thunder, flushed quail, gunshot, or viper. The mare’s only care was for oat mash, and even that she pursued slowly.

One of Tony’s shipments of rare metals came in on the freight train. Tony was so deeply focused on fabrication that he could hardly form a full sentence without lapsing into muttered figures and estimated dimensions, so Steve struck out atop Primrose, bandana covering the lower half of his face, to pick up the crate.

Primrose didn’t even flick an ear when they came across six feet of fat rattlesnake, stretched across the wagon ruts. Steve had to pull her up short so she didn’t plod all over it. He swung down onto the ground, holding Primrose’s reins out of habit -- the old mule wasn’t going to go anywhere without a great deal of convincing.

_You did it,_ said old Sidewinder, sunning himself in the high noon. _The Sheriff protects his land again._

“Red Wolf’s sheriff these days,” Steve said. “I’m just a man doin’ his best.”

_Congratulations,_ Sidewinder hissed.

“I ain’t dying this time,” said Steve. “So I got no need of resurrection. And if you want to bite me back to death, I’d appreciate the chance to go home and tell my honey ‘bout it.”

Snakes don’t laugh; they don’t have the throats for it. Sidewinder rearranged his jaw instead, the pink blush of his mouth opening like a cactus flower. Primrose shifted her hindquarters and pissed in the road, unimpressed.

_You still hungry, Sheriff?_

He was. Nothing had slaked it, not rabbit, nor fry-bread dipped in stew, nor a hundred sweet kisses.

_That honey of yours -- he looks toothsome and fine, don’t he?_

He did.

_You hold godhood in your cheeks, hatchling. The desert wants one more soul, and she’s real patient._

Old Sidewinder slithered off the road and down the dry gulch. If you watched him go out of just the corner of your eye, you might have seen the corner of a blanket woven with stark diamonds in black, white and rust vanish into the thorny brush.

The price of being one of the desert’s saints was to become a saint-maker oneself.

* * *

Steve stroked Tony from wrist to elbow-crook the same way Tony stroked the neck of an unopened bottle.

He trusted Sidewinder. Vipers are straightforward creatures. It’s not their fault that harmless snakes imitate their colors. If Steve bit Tony, it would give him to the desert as something more useful than a corpse. It would ease Steve’s awful hunger.

But Steve loved Tony alive. He was warm as a hearthstone, and he sang to Steve in a smooth tenor that sounded nothing like wind through cactus spines.

Steve resolved that soon, he’d tell Tony about the deal. He’d pose it as an option for when Tony was old: if Steve hadn’t aged himself, maybe Tony would like to try on some fangs and learn to enjoy eating game with the fur on. It was the kind of resolution that led to fences falling down -- you’d get to that old rotten post after fixing the chicken coop, after baling the hay, after treating the cow’s sore heel -- and by the time soon came around, the pigs’d be at the corn.

* * *

Soon came as Steve returned home one day, sated by a brace of prairie chicken and picking feathers out of his teeth. He’d met some cattle rustlers and foiled their plans by spooking the horses; it had been a good day. Steve was inclined to whistle as he walked.

The porch was empty, Tony’s basket of whittling sticks lonely amid a drift of curled wood shavings. The door was ajar, and Steve could smell cornbread and sausage just starting to burn. Tony cooking and getting distracted halfway through, again. He’d been making tiny models of oil derricks out of paper and pins all week, complaining about blowouts and gushers and drill bits whenever Steve was willing to listen, which was always, so long as there was a sunny spot or a hot forge nearby.

Steve made his way into the kitchen, and found Tony on the floor, his back propped up against the leg of the dining table.

Tony’s lips were blueish, his eyelids shuttered like a house with a tornado on the way. His chest barely rose.

Steve’s first thought was, _Thank God, I’ve been so hungry for so long._ He promptly felt guilty.

The corner of Tony’s mouth twitched up like he’d heard Steve, but he didn’t have the strength to make words. He cracked one eye open. _Not the reaction I was expecting, honestly, to you finding out that my ticker’s given up on me,_ he said into Steve’s head. _You can have my share of the sausage, if you like._

Steve sank to the floor beside Tony to brush sweaty hair off of his temple. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I oughta --_

_Hush,_ Tony said. _Should have told you I’ve got a bum heart. Gonna kneel and say an Ave for me, Danny boy?_

_Do ya one better,_ Steve said, and explained.

* * *

Tony came back quicker than Steve did, with someone to show him the way. He wasn’t near so hungry, although he promptly ate a collared lizard, thrilled that he was quick enough to catch it by the tail.

Tony Stark had got a head start on canonization when he built himself a one-man steam engine, but it had been incomplete. He was armored like a scorpion, but he lacked its stinging tail: he could crush, but not paralyze. The scorpion uses its claws to hunt, but its venom to kill. A scorpion with the barb clipped from its tail and kept as a pet will starve. Steve made him whole with one bite to his wrist, a quick strike that dug deep but spilled barely a pinprick of blood.

Tony wasn’t quite the same kind of creature that Steve had become. Where Steve’s fangs were bone, Tony’s were chitin. Steve melted into sagebrush, while under the right light Tony glowed like Saint Elmo’s fire. But where they walked, they went together.

You can still find them, out in the territories: the rattlesnake’s saint carrying a six-shooter and a silver-eyed grin; the scorpion’s piloting a train along no track laid by man.

* * *


End file.
